Union, a first atomic installation was erected at the Tweita site, some ten kilometers southeast of Baghdad. In a few years the French hurried to help, too. France supplied the Iraqi dictator Sadaam Hussein with an advanced research reactor designed for uranium enrichment. The plant name was changed to Tammuz One. At the same time, the Iraqis continued to seek diligently for ready-made fission materials—including military-grade plutonium, the substance of nuclear warheads—from every possible source. This activity contradicted their announcements that their intention was just to produce nuclear energy for civilian applications. On October 25, 1979, Saddam Hussein declared, “The struggle against Israel will be long and hard—the Israelis may try to use atomic bombs—for this reason, Arabs must prepare the tools for victory.”
“Prepare the tools for victory.” This was hardly anything but a lame excuse. Israel hadn’t been threatening anybody. There was no doubt that Iraq was trying to justify its acquisition of the atomic bomb.
There was only one real meaning: a clear and present danger to the people of Israel.
IN MID-1979, WHEN THE IRANIAN F-16 deal finally passed to Israel, it became clear that seventy-five new ultramodern aircraft, together with their equipment, would arrive in Israel starting in mid-1980. The air base chosen to absorb all of them was Ramat-David, the northern base in the Izreel Valley.
The Ramat-David of 1979 was an old base, and they had only one year to reorganize it for the new acquisitions. The base commander, Col. Rami Harpaz, began preparations.
Rami was a broad-shouldered, robust guy with a curly white forelock. I first met him twenty years before, when I arrived at the Scorpions. He was one of the central figures in that talented squadron. Later Rami became one of the first Phantom fliers, together with Sam Khetz and Avihu. In the War of Attrition, in one of the battles against the SAM arrays, Rami was shot down and spent the next four years in an Egyptian prison. After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, prisoners were repatriated, and Rami, who was intact physically and mentally (he once told me that being a POW had been a very educational experience), returned to active duty while keeping a kibbutz member, which he remains to this day.
Rami began with the story of the early days of the F-16. When we first heard about it, some felt it was going to be hard. But he had been the project manager.
“I said, ‘So they are coming a year or two earlier than expected? Bring it on.’”
For someone like Rami, who personally had experienced the difficult integration of the Phantoms in 1969, saying that might sound reckless. But he knew the quality of his northern base’s men.
“There is no such thing as ‘impossible’ in the lexicon of Ramat-David,” he said. From my seat in the corner I smiled to myself. When I inherited the base and the project from Rami on January 1, 1980, the clock already was running toward the landing of the F-16s, and I saw with my own eyes what he meant.
“Ramat-David was an obsolete field,” said Lieutenant Colonel Amikam, the construction officer, when his turn came to speak. “All the underground hangars were old, and the worst thing was that the entrances into some of them were too small for the new aircraft.” Amikam projected photos on our living room wall. They showed how huge concrete chunks had to be sawed off the revetments to provide larger entryways for the new fighters. This was a difficult and hazardous engineering task. The F-16, though relatively small, was a tall machine with a wingspan wider than that of a Mirage, which had fit into those hangars like a hand into a glove.
“The technical labs also couldn’t absorb the multitude of new technical systems coming in. We began a vigorous effort of construction and renovation. We worked around the clock.”
Even twenty years later it was hard for us who were there in 1980 to understand what a revolution had occurred at our base. Rami had to arm and service the new, expensive assets he was about to get, and he had neither place nor services for them. It was impossible to rebuild the whole base, or to evict its current inhabitants, so he and his staff had to think outside the box.
Rami and Amikam armored old parking lots and sheds with concrete, precast plates, then routed into them electricity, fuel, and communication lines. Everything they touched needed to change, and every day a new plan had to be approved and budgeted—power generators, fuel lines, ammo stores. They built housing and installed water and sewage pipes. They even invented a theory to convince themselves that those updated shacks were much better than the traditional underground shelters.
“The pressure was so great,” said Amikam, “that we were forced to deviate from our own schedules and began working on the most pressing matters. When the first four F-16s landed in July 1980, they found just one hangar ready for them (the night before, workers were still hanging lamps on the ceilings, and painting), and the next hangar was still in pieces and surrounded by scaffolding. It was scheduled to be opened on the very day the second formation of four planes arrived. And so on. The technical servicing equipment was put to work in provisional labs, while building blocks were being set, roofs cast, cables and pipes laid out for it somewhere else.”
Lieutenant Colonel Ami Rabin, the maintenance officer of the base and a serious guy, had his own problems. The F-16 was a very sophisticated, innovative machine. It was the first aircraft in the world to be an unstable, “fly by wire” fighter. This meant that the trim was computer-controlled. It could not fly without constant computer monitoring of its flight. To this end, Ami had to develop a whole new culture of computers and computer engineering in the maintenance of the base. The jet engine was very special, too. No one had experience in maintaining this aircraft or operational know-how. The Americans themselves hadn’t put the F-16 on an operational basis yet. There was a shortage of good men, so Ami drew whole technical teams out of the existing fighter squadrons of the base—the Skyhawks, Phantoms, and Israeli-produced Kfirs—and almost stripped them of their technical staffs. This, of course, caused hardship and risk—the squadrons based at Ramat-David, like the rest of the air force, continued to fly and fight—but people were needed, and he took them from every other mission, and told them to concentrate on the F-16 alone. A local technical school was opened, and hundreds of technicians were retrained there, using books sent from the United States. The demands were enormous, and the pressure built up accordingly on all levels. Sometimes it was difficult to cope. One day Ami returned with the base commander from a discussion in the air force’s headquarters in Tel Aviv. Rami said to him, “Take note, Ami, you were wrong.”
“Why?” asked Ami Rabin, who was still recovering from an argument over something.
“You were right about everything you said,” said Rami, “but why did you have to shout?”
“How can one keep calm—”
“One can. You just decide that you won’t get angry, and you don’t.”
After four years of outstanding leadership among his ten comrades in a Cairo prison, Rami definitely knew how to control himself.
AND TRULY, RAMAT-DAVID of 1979 didn’t seem the right place to base a large number of modern fighters. It was an antiquated RAF base that had had repeated face-lifts for decades, and was all patched and speckled with tar barrels, among which the aircraft taxied. The base’s installations were inferior even to Hatzerim’s in the time my Orange Tails were established there, a decade earlier. As in all the other installations we inherited from the Brits, you could find in Ramat-David ultra-modern machines and super technologies functioning inside shacks with patched ceilings.
We all recalled that stormy and rainy night at the end of December 1979 when the brook outside of the northern fence overflowed its banks and flooded the base. This was the surprise from hell. Aircraft revetments were filled with streams of murky water. Fuel tanks floated down slopes like kayaks, jet fighter aircraft were covered with water up to their air intakes, bombs and missiles sank and were lost under layers of mud. Soon the electricity also went out, leaving black winter darkness. Water kept falling from the skies and gushing out of the new river, the pumps died, and the water level rose.
I was then just a visitor in Ramat-David. We had moved there few days before, since I had to assume command the next week. I saw this and understood the meaning of having only seven months to turn this junkyard into a decent place for seventy-five new F-16s. But it was still that night, and I left home and hurried to the operational sector of the base to try to help not as a commander, but as an ordinary pair of hands. With the lights of my car, I found my way to hangar sixteen, where there was only a lone figure, the technical officer, Lt. Dov Bar Or, working in the water with a small tractor trying to drag a Phantom from the underground hangar up to the runway. The hangar was pitch dark like a huge cave, and full of chest-high, muddy water. Closing my eyes, I dived in and felt my way around in the freezing, dirty water. With fumbling fingers I connected the tractor fork to the Phantom’s front wheels, and watched how it began moving through the mud and up to the still-open taxiway.
We did this six times in a row, and the tiny diesel tractor, skidding in the mud, pulled six Phantoms one after
